Crash course
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Hauliers who take a fatalistic view of accidents should think again. Preventive action can reduce the likelihood of your drivers always crashing in the same place or always reversing into the same loading bay wall. To find out how, Steve McQueen sat in on a university seminar with operators determined to cut the cost of carelessness.
F0, gut the deaths and injuries what
might be described as the moral issues of road safety—let's talk sales. Say you spent £50,000 on crash repairs last year. And say, like many distribution companies, your return over the same period was around 5%.
Congratulations: you managed to increase this year's sales target by about Lim.
However, plenty of hauliers scrape by with a return of nearer 1%, and that equates to a cool £5m worth of business, just to cover your accident costs.
If you're in that unenviable position you could be about to do your bit for road safety by going out of business. But let's assume your sales team can make good the difference and in a few months you'll be back into profitability. Won't the next series of accident returns ravage your figures once more?
While most hauliers sit and wonder where all the revenue goes, an enlightened few have realised that it is being swallowed by accident repair costs and spiralling insurance premiums.
One Saturday morning earlier this month, six of them turned up at Huddersfield University as part of a pilot project to spread the word that road safety is good for business.
Government figures
They were also fully aware of the costs of road accidents in terms of death and misery. The most recent government figures show a death toll of 3,621 a year; 597 of them involving LGVs. Trucks account for 1% of the vehicles on the road, but they account for 16.5% of the fatalities.
Will Murray, Huddersfield University's senior lecturer in transport and logistics, aims to help managers evaluate the cost and causes of accidents more, and he's fully aware that the effect on profits is an effective argument in the cause of road safety.
"We actually used this on the branch managers," said Francis Mullally, field transport manager for Parceline. "We said, 'what do you want to do: go out and stop a 000 accident or get the sales team to go out and sell an extra
£4,000 or whatever the amount was— worth of extra business?' Suddenly they all started taking notes."
Murray hopes that once operators understand the full cost of accidents they will be keen to analyse the causes and develop approaches to help reduce the number of accidents in their own companies. And for once it's not just a case of blame it on the drivers.
"Ws easy to say train the drivers," said Murray, "but in my opinion there should be a lot more attention paid to educating and training the management into how they can get their accident costs down. They should be encouraged to have goals in terms of reducing accidents, to take more interest in those costs—to place more emphasis on safety. It's managers that need to be worked on first."
At his seminar Murray was preaching to the converted. All the hauliers at the meeting had some involvement with Murray's department, either as graduates or by contributing data to the university's accident research programme.
The information this programme has produced is intriguing. One case study revealed how a home delivery operator was made .4 aware that of the accidents involving its 250 vehicles, 31% involved striking parked cars and fixed objects like gate pasts, while 30% were reversing incidents.
A second study showed how a multi-drop urban delivery operator with a fleet of 140 vehicles was suffering 80% of its collisions in similar categories.
Management can always argue that because drivers are behind the wheel they are the root cause of the problem. However, it is the managers who must identify the problems and implement the solutions.
Murray advocates that collection of accurate accident data is an essential element of finding those solutions.
Accident damage
Huddersfield graduate Jeff Parr is a transport manager for Wincanton on a Tesco contract based near Manchester. He said: When I started, we were £53,000 overspent on the budget through accident damage. I had to do something about it but I didn't know what to do or where to start, so I came here."
Parr introduced a regime whereby drivers were provided with immunity from disciplinary action concerning accidents provided they gave all the information about every incident that could be construed as an accident.
The number of accidents reported skyrocketed but there were immediate results. For example, the data revealed that broken rear lights were an almost weekly occurrence at one store. A phone call solved the problem of a rubber buffer set too low on the loading bay.
A second solution was even more basic, but had spectacular results.
"We were regularly having accidents costing about £2,000 a time, but no-one twigged that it was always happening at the same store in Hyde," said Parr. "We went down and had a look and it was a problem with the camber. The union rep suggested we paint a white line as a guide for the drivers. It cost about 150 and the accidents stopped overnight."
Repair bill
Since developing the programme further, Parr has recorded a £12,000 reduction in the annual repair bill—with accidents down by almost 50%. As a bonus fuel costs have come down by 5%.
Any prolonged gathering of operators is guaranteed to produce operational war stories, and the Huddersfield seminar was no exception. What was different in this case was the desire to find a satisfactory solution to accident-related problems, driven in every case by a thorough understanding of each company's own particular problems.
For example, Liz Timperley, freight manager at Bradford-based chemical distribution specialist Ellis and Everard, explained how detailed analysis of her company's accident figures led to the desire to be more selective about its customers. Sales reps are no longer allowed to accept new business without first checking the premises for access.
"OK, we might lose business if we turn away the customer," said Timperley, "but if the vehicles can't get in without an accident of some sort there wouldn't have been much profit in it so the loss wouldn't have been all that great anyway."
Shelley Gash is business manager for the Huddersfield-based Accident Management Company, which offers its diagnostic services to operators worldwide. She pointed out that, while agency drivers may be a necessary part of everyday operations, they are more likely to have accidents because they are driving unfamiliar vehicles and making drops to unfamiliar places.
Sheila Black, risk manager for TDG's Nexus, explained how the company had begun to address this issue, helped by Murray and his team: "Since 1 January we have told the agencies that we will not use their drivers unless they have been through our training course," she said.
Logistics school
Paul Moorby, traffic office manager at Shepherd Distribution in Sheffield, is a more recent graduate from the Huddersfield logistics school. He agreed with Gash's view that many companies see accident administration as an add-on chore for an administrator to handle. Shepherd Distribution plans to change that approach.
Murray's arguments carry a powerful message about accident reduction, from an alter native viewpoint. He doesn't ignore the moral issues—they are motivation for his research. It's just that the moral argument doesn't seem to work, while the alternatives presented by the results of accident research such as this, seem to be effective.
Murray's solution involves the collection and interpretation of accurate accident data, followed by a training programme which focuses on identified weaknesses.
According to the operators at this meeting, it works. To find out how to apply it to your company, you'll have to attend one of Murray's seminars.